Critics reviews

["Cure"] doesn’t build its brand of horror on scary moments, but where Kurosawa’s mastery of the horror genre really comes through is in the movie’s creeping dread. His direction is still, quiet, and almost emotionless, pulling us slowly into a terrifying and grisly mystery that he makes feel almost real.

Cure is an increasingly hallucinatory piece where murderousness is a disease spreading rapidly through the susceptible Japanese psyche. And where those who, in failing to confront or act on their own repressed desires, avoid the sickness, also risk becoming just another part of its aetiology. The results are chillingly nihilistic.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's breakthrough, Cure (1997), established its director as the most original horror stylist since John Carpenter. Style-wise, Kurosawa ditches familiar horror-movie tropes—shock cuts, crescendoing music—in favor of elliptic editing, ambiguous action, and long, widely framed takes.

Even [the director's] most ardent fans will concede that Kurosawa isn’t quite so accomplished on the script side it may take several viewings to work out exactly whats going in the latter stages. But the lengthy final shot is arguably the most remarkable in all recent cinema.

Kurosawa ostensibly has made a police thriller, but it's more psychological than a genre movie, and that is the source of both its greatest interest and its biggest problem.

A grave, magnificently creepy thriller... The last couple of shots are head-scratchers (I had to have them explained to me), but the film transcends its murkiness and eats into the mind. Cure is what ails you.

Rather than resort to clever plot twists and reversals, Mr. Kurosawa constructs an elaborate psychological maze and then strands us in the middle of it. The final scene is a piece of cunning visual wit that makes you realize how artful and sneaky ''Cure''... has been beneath its clinical, deadpan surface. You may walk out of the theater arguing about what that last moment means, and afraid to meet the eye of the person you're arguing with.

One of the moodiest, most brilliantly sustained occult chillers since Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim... "Cure" sticks with you—it’s a movie about the power of suggestion that casts a troubling spell on the viewer as well.

“Cure” makes having it both ways look easy and natural. It creates excitement with pulp elements while playing games with genre expectations, pushing at the boundaries of narrative convention--not to mention your mind--while obliquely commenting on the alienating tendencies of modern society. And all without overplaying its hand or doing anything forced.

What is so exciting about Kurosawa is that he ignores the shorthand. You won't find a signpost cliche here. What you will find is a dark place called madness.

While its creepy mystery plot is easy enough to follow even when it turns metaphysical, it’s unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them... Stylistically it’s the most inventive Japanese feature I’ve seen in some time, much more unpredictable than Takeshi Kitano’s recent yakuza exercises.

The resolution of the dark, broodingly performed psychodrama lacks impact. But the film remains a mesmerizing twist on a familiar genre.